livebooks blog

An image from Ed's "Curse of the Black Gold" project, which leverages years worth of multimedia content to raise awareness about the tragic effects of the oil companies in the area. ©Ed Kashi

1/7/09

Photojournalism and the documentary tradition is alive and well, but like Frank Zappa once said about jazz, “Jazz is not dead, it just smells funny.” The question I constantly confront is, how do we move this medium forward into the new millennium, keeping it fresh, alive, relevant and growing? We cannot let the digital revolution destroy the magical powers of still photography. I firmly believe we are in a period of transcendent growth and opportunity. How do we reinvent still photography in the digital age and prove the naysayers wrong?

Having the patience and time to produce in-depth, meaningful work is of utmost importance — but now without the support of magazines, how do we continue? We cannot allow the economic and political shifts in media to destroy our ability to get out into the world to tell stories people want to hear and see. We’ve never been at a more challenging crossroads for photojournalism, and finding alternative sources of funding and dissemination are essential. What will those look like and who will they come from? My guess is from a variety of places: NGOs and other foundations with specific interest in the issues our work deals with, the editorial world both in print and online (with online providing the bulk of new opportunities over time), grants from both the arts and photography, but also direct partnerships with non-media sources such as universities.

In the face of all this uncertainty, it’s especially important to keep it real for yourself and true to your passions, causes, joys, and inquisitions. What drives me is the compulsion to seek a kind of truth, to find out what certain realities feel and look like as they relate to issues and themes that matter to me personally. Now when I translate those situations into stories, they are no longer only visual — instead they include all the elements of storytelling. Still images are the basis for these stories and the structure for my explorations. But utilizing more of the senses, with sound that incorporates the voices of my subjects, the ambient sounds of the situations my images are made in, moving imagery to give more visual dimension to the subjects and place, and finally music…that most universal of languages. Today we inhabit a playland of creative opportunities unrivaled from the past. Yet for me still photographs form the emotional core, visual feel, and personal approach to my work as firmly as ever.

Abay, 28, Awash Fontale, Ethiopia ©Phil Borges, courtesy CARE

Miki Johnson: How did you first come across Phil Borges and his work? Did he make contact with you first?

Valenda Campbell: I’ve been here at CARE since 2001 and part of my role is to find photographers to represent our work. My associate photo editor at the time, Jason Sangster, and I were familiar with Phil’s work, through his Tibetan Portrait and Enduring Spirit projects. This was I guess around Spring of 2004 and we were looking at his work and saying, wow, his style of photography really captures that connection that we want our supporters to make with our project participants. And the way he was able to concisely give the viewer a glimpse into that person’s life and their world was just great. So we said let’s call him up and see if he’d be interested in working some with CARE. So Jason contacted him and we set up a conference call.

We got on the phone and told him what we were about. We let him know that we were really interested in working with him and asked if he would possibly do some work for CARE to help us get our message out. He was interested. I think Phil really connected with the fact that we work primarily with indigenous communities in developing countries and emphasize work with women and girls. He had been photographing indigenous communities for years and he already knew, from all of his travels and his previous projects, how women and girls who are usually marginalized can really influence their families and communities if given the opportunity. So it was just a really good match, and we began talking about what we could put together. What do we want to do? What do we want to accomplish? And that’s how it started.

MJ: And what did that conversation sound like when you guys started to talk about your goals and what you could do together?

VC: We familiarized Phil with everything CARE does, all the variety of programming we do, including microfinance, education, HIV/AIDS, maternal health, emergency relief, the whole gamut. We explained how, at that time, we were beginning to place new emphasis in our communications around CARE’s work with women. Our development work had evolved over the years, and we realized that CARE’s most successful programming was centered around the empowerment of women in the communities where we work. And that really struck a cord with Phil.

He’s a busy man, and he’s not one to just sort of take on a random commission here and there. He was really interested, but if we were going to do something, he wanted it to be a project. If he was going to commit some time to it, he wanted to have really specific outcomes in mind. And he let us know that the message that we had to deliver and the kinds of projects we were talking about was really meshing well with what he was looking to do for his next big project. He talked about everything he’d learned and come to realize through his work with these cultures and that he felt our messaging around women’s empowerment captured that. More »

Hillary Clinton perusing a New Hampshire Deli as part of a routine photo-op, this one to emphasize her appeal to the "common man." Chin photographed her pacing instead of posing to reveal the "staginess" of this kind of campaign ritual. ©Alan Chin

Alan and I met when I ran one of his pictures on the blog from when he was embedded in Iraq. We had this big conversation going in the discussion thread, and he just showed up and said, look, I’m Alan Chin, I took this picture, and you guys don’t understand, you’re not here. At first, no one believed he was Alan Chin. I remember he was getting mad and wrote something to the effect of, “I can’t believe I’m sitting over here risking my life and I’m having to defend to you people that I’m Alan Chin.”

But what Alan realized from that experience was that the view I and my readers had of the situation was completely different than the frame of reference he had as a photojournalist in Iraq. And very quickly, what the BAGnewsNotes crew realized was that we were making all kinds of assumptions because — between the Bush Administration, the embedding program, and the media’s self-censorship — we had a very obscured picture of what was happening on the ground.

After Alan returned, we started collaborating on posts where I would interpret Alan’s images, comparing and contrasting the way the traditional media defined the story and how the Administration and the political spin machines were trying to frame it. We did that for his numerous trips to post-Katrina New Orleans and various 9/11 anniversaries he photographed from Ground Zero. As we entered the ’08 election cycle, this collaboration evolved even further to the point where, to best determine the political story line and our visual plan of attack for that day, we would actually share each others perspective: mine, the tone, mood, and circumstances highlighted by the media, his, the actual mood and mindset of the various campaign camps.

The Bush Administration insisted that FEMA had everything stabilized in New Orleans by early 2006. This image demonstrates otherwise. This "town meeting," which started with a discussion on formaldehyde poisoning, broke into conflict during an attempt to elect a new committee of representatives. ©Alan Chin

It worked basically like this. He’s on the campaign trail, and having gone to one or two campaign events, he calls to tell me what is going on. For example, this couple whose daughter died because she was allegedly denied medical treatment from her insurance company is traveling with John Edwards and they are saying this and the people are reacting this way. And my response is: Really? Because the media is presenting it like this-and-this. So, from my end, I’ll sketch out the narrative the media has constructed and how the campaign messages have been interpreted, and I feed that to Alan. Often his reaction is, Wow, that’s really weird compared to the impressions and feedback from local organizers, campaign people speaking off the record, other photographers, citizens following the campaigns, and so on. So we’ll cook all this together in quick 10-minute conversations usually. The result is that he now has a picture in his head of how events are playing out between “the media filter” and “the public square,” which allows him to shoot not just what’s going on, but but to potentially capture moments and imagery that might call out the politics, the message-making, and/or what people have been conditioned to see.

There is also a check-and-balance to this process in the feedback we get from our readership. From the beginning, BAGnewsNotes has been structured as a seminar. So the idea is, I can have an idea or an agenda, or Alan and I can go out and see something that we think is happening. In posting the material, however, what we are doing is presenting it to our readership. Then they lend their eyes and their frame of reference to the edit and our interpretation of the images. Using that approach, the readers represent a SWAT team of analysts, since that many are deeply informed on politics, not to mention well versed in history, economics, in government. Still others are professional photographers who really understand the visual circumstances and dynamics around the acquisition of images. So by putting content out in a seminar fashion, we’re essentially asking, “Do we have this right?” Or, “What else is going on?” “What else could it mean?”

In setting up this kind of environment, we’re never simply looking to map pictures to specific narratives or agendas. If an image is really expressive, in fact, it will function prismatically. In other words, it’s possible that there will be seven, eight, nine different social or cultural or political implications within the picture. And if that’s the case, our audience will typically find and elaborate on most or all of them. So it’s pretty democratic that way. And that’s why, approaching political pictures this way, I’ve had a robust number of comments on the site from day one, especially in proportion to my overall traffic. And, even if a post only draws a few comments, it’s more likely than not that the feedback is pretty insightful.

One of Robert's images from the Tongass Rainforest. ©Robert Glenn Ketchum

Although there is always the fluke opportunity for a picture book to sell hundreds of thousands of copies, like Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s Earth From Above, or Ernest Haas’s The Creation, the likelihood of that happening is one percent. The rest of us are pretty lucky if we sell 25,000 books — we’re actually pretty luck if we sell 10. And then if you narrow your market by trying to intellectualize anything, or in particular politicize anything, to take it anywhere other than just a pretty picture book about a popular theme, then you lose even more of the market. Your publisher’s not interested. Your bookstores don’t respond in the same way. Your readership gets smaller. And don’t forget that when you publish a book, it goes to the first tier of distribution, and that’s national, then the price usually doubles. Then it goes from there to the smaller distributors, and then the price increases again. Then from the smaller distributors it goes to the bookstores. If the bookstores take it, it’s maybe two copies, and it ends up spine-out unless the publishing company has paid for some kind of display. So now you’ve got this book you’ve put years of effort into, photographing, editing, publishing. Plus the cost. And it ends up spine-out in some bookstore. If you’re trying to change anything, especially change the world in any way, it’s not likely it’s going to happen at that pace.

I learned a lot about this with The Hudson River and the Highlands, my first book with Aperture. I met Aperture through the Lila Acheson Wallace Fund, which commissioned Stephen Shore, William Clift, and I to photograph the river. My images were pretty confrontational and political, so when I originally presented them to the Wallace Fund, I said, I recognize this is not what you gave me the commission for. You don’t have to use them, I just want to show you that I’m doing them. And they said, these are the ones we think are the most important, because they were working form a conservation perspective.

From there I was introduced to Aperture. It didn’t take me very long at Aperture to realize the frustration of publishing a book and having the limited exposure and sales. We still did well, we sold over 10,000, but only because it was Hudson River and New York. Michael Hoffman, the former president of Aperture said to me, “You take away part of your market by putting these politicized photographs in, but I understand the foundation is supporting it. It’s a kind of corruption of the coffee table book, so I guess it’s interesting that we’re doing it here at Aperture.” And that’s how it was viewed. My further frustration was that the book didn’t reach a wider audience than the Hudson River lovers. It didn’t reach the conservation audience I wanted, and it didn’t really comment on Regan’s take on the Clean Water Act, which was what I kind of implied in my essay.

Another, less idyllic image from the Tongass. ©Robert Glenn Ketchum

So when we came to the table with the Tongass rainforest book, again I was working with Aperture. This time I was determined to be more strident in my political content and to look at book distribution more realistically in terms of what I expected to sell and get from a royalty. First I said, I think this minimal royalty for sales, which is all projected out over years, is a joke. How much are you going to give me, if you added it all up? And usually you’re lucky if it’s between $20,000 and $50,000. I said, how about you give me that in books at cost? I do lectures and workshops for non-profit fund raising and things like that where I will sell my books, and I agreed not to poach their bookstore sales by selling at retail. And then I would just go away, and they’d never have to pay me a royalty or anything, I just get those books free. Well Aperture was happy to do that and I was happy to get free from Aperture’s bureaucracy. In particular it allowed me to hand out books when I felt like it because they only cost a couple bucks.

Having published the Tongass book, I wanted to change the way it was distributed. So I approached foundations in the conservation community. I struck an agreement between one of the foundations and Aperture to buy books at cost (about 800) so that they could be handed out in Congress, not only to members but also their legislative assistants. And Aperture agreed. That was Aperture’s first introduction to the idea. So that happened with the Tongass book, and we got it handed out in Congress and widely distributed through information networks like Natural Resources Defense Council and Earthjustice that needed it as a visual imaging device.

An image from Robert's Overlooked In America book. ©Robert Glenn Ketchum

From the time we published that book in ’86, the presence was accumulative, sort of a ball going downhill, gaining momentum. And in 1990 we passed the largest timber reform bill in history of United States. The book was not the sole element that made that happen. It was all the people working on the project. But it gave them something to carry around in their hands to say, this is what it looks like, and, more importantly, this is what’s being done to it, because the clear-cuts were in the book. And the industrial log yards and people being displaced in the fishing industry were in there. So there was challenging stuff like the images I’d integrated into the Hudson book, but more stridently so, and the essay stopped beating around the bush and came out and called a spade a spade and got a lot of people in trouble. It was a real political advocacy books. It probably had a very limited market in terms of real picture book marketing. Yet it had a huge life, and went to a third addition, 50,000 copies, but mostly by handout, request mailing, website sales, and foundations networking. The group I did all this with is the Macintosh Foundation; they also helped with the distribution in Congress and they helped underwrite the traveling exhibition that showed at the National Museum of Natural History on Earth Day. They operate some boats in Southeast Alaska for recreational use and they appreciate the eco-tourism value of the land as opposed to the log-it-to-death aspect.

That opened the door to my ensuing book with the Akron Art Museum, which resulted from a commission to photograph the newly created Cuyahoga Valley National Recreation Area. The book, Overlooked in America, went beyond the context of Ohio and examined all federal lands in North America and the way they were being mistreated. Aperture was also the publisher on that production, and their literal words were, “This book is so bitter, we can’t imagine a readership audience.” And they didn’t want to run it. So my funders said to Aperture, if somebody paid for printing costs, would Aperture help distribute any books? And Aperture said, probably just 1,000. So we ran 10,000 and distributed the rest to the environmental networks. And those books were on the front lines of battles about mining, about parks — they even got handed out in Alaska when the battle started over the mine in Bristol Bay. I’d done a completely different set of books there, but they still found Overlooked in America useful to hand out. So these books have another kind of life. They live on the shelves, but they have another life where they serve advocates. But they don’t get out if you don’t take them out into that advocate world.